Channel bonding Gigabit Ethernet

[Trent Piepho]

On Tue, 26 Nov 2002, Jakob Oestergaard wrote:
> The way to fix it, would be to let the bonding driver select which NIC
> to transmit on, based on some hash of the packet headers. This would
> then not give you any benefit on a single TCP stream, but it would allow
> multiple concurrent TCP streams to exceed the one-NIC bottleneck.
> 
> AFAIK, this has not been done. I haven't seen any patches for it - but
> again, google is your friend  :)

The newest version of the bonding driver supports round robin, fail-over, xor,
and broadcast.  xor would be the one to use, but it's based on MAC addresses,
so all communication between a two given hosts will use the same interface. 
It would allow you to connect two Gb cards from a head node into a single
switch, and then balance communication with more than one slave over the two
cards.

BTW, the bonding driver in 2.4.19 will hang a SMP machine when it's loaded,
you need to d/l the newest version.  2.4.20-rc2 doesn't hang, but it doesn't
have the xor and fail-over stuff.